Ammon Bundy, "man about town," talking water and housing in Oregon and Idaho

This piece out of Klamath Falls, Oregon about the West's water crisis caught my attention last month.  Emmas Marris reports in The Atlantic, under the headline, "The West Can End the Water Wars Now."  Here's the lede for the story, which doesn't focus on Bundy, but does provide important context:

[I]n the West, people are, by and large, aggrieved. This is not entirely their fault. Federal and state governments have made lots of promises to people in the West, or to their parents or grandparents. Some people were promised that their land would not be taken, while other people were promised free land. Some were told that they could withdraw water from this or that lake or river every year until the end of time, others that their right to hunt or fish on their territory would never be infringed.

But the natural abundance those promises were based on has been squandered by generations of mismanagement. In the Klamath Basin, in Southern Oregon and Northern California, where I live, Klamath tribal members haven’t been able to exercise their “exclusive right of taking fish in the streams and lakes,” as protected in a 1864 treaty, for decades, because the fish keep dying.

And here's the bit that sums up what Bundy is up to (note, it potentially involves violence):   

A handful of far-right agitators connected with the infamous anti-government cowboy Ammon Bundy spent $30,000 to buy a plot of land adjacent to the closed headgates of the main irrigation canal, and they are publicly threatening to force them open. The gates are controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation and blocked with bulkheads. Heavy machinery would be required to move them. The farmers Grant Knoll and Dan Nielsen are giving interviews from the shade of a large, circus-striped tent by the headgates: They see their promised water allocation as private property that the federal government has stolen from them.

And then Anita Chabria and Hailey Branson-Potts reported for the Los Angeles Times that Bundy, in suburban Boise, Idaho, was arguing that the shortage of housing was a reason to end public land ownership.  The headline is "Ammon Bundy seizes on housing shortage in new bid to take public lands in Idaho."  Here's a salient quote:

Bundy is reframing the decades-long but narrow fight of his father, Cliven Bundy, against the Bureau of Land Management — the other BLM, as it’s known here — into a platform with broader appeal. He wants to use the governorship to wrest ownership of federal land for state control. It’s a campaign aimed at voters dreaming of wide open spaces and homes they can afford, wrapped in an idealized view of western life where land and resources are limited only by an unwillingness to use them.

Neither America nor the Gem State, he told the crowd, can survive the liberal creep of growing cities or the economic toll of too few houses for too many people. To “keep Idaho Idaho,” as his slogan promises, growth needs to happen out instead of up, as he puts it.

The federal government is “forcing everybody down into big cities and where they’re just surviving,” Bundy said in a recent interview with The Times. He spoke from his home outside Boise on five acres of apple orchards in an agricultural area known as Treasure Valley, surrounded by public lands.

Of course, Bundy and his family have long pressed for an end to federal government ownership of land.  That's been their signature issue, as covered here, regarding the 2016 seizure of the Malheur Wildlife Reserve, and other issues.  

Anti-fed seizure of federal wildlife refuge one of today's big headlines, dateline: Burns, Oregon

I awakened this morning to a story, dateline Burns, Oregon, population 2,806, on nytimes.com. By his afternoon it had become the top story—at least among domestic news.  The headline for Kirk Johnson and Julie Turkewitz's report this evening is "Armed Group Vows to Hold Federal Wildlife Office in Oregon 'For Years.'"  The lede follows:

An armed antigovernment group vowed Sunday to continue to occupy a federal wildlife refuge building in rural Oregon indefinitely, in protest of the government’s treatment of two local ranchers. 

Federal officials said that they were monitoring the takeover, but there did not appear to be an imminent plan to confront the protesters.

Burns is one of two population centers in sparsely populated Harney County, in the eastern part of the state.  Oregon law enforcement officials said today:

These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.

Ammon Bundy, a Montana rancher, appeared to be the leader of the group.  Bundy's father is Cliven Bundy, who "became a symbol of antigovernment sentiment in 2014" when he "inspired a standoff between local militias and federal officials seeking to confiscate cattle grazing illegally on federal land for more than a decade."  A statement captured on video today showed Mr. Bundy stating that the group was prepared to be out here for as long as need be” and would leave only when the people of Harney County “can use these lands as free men.

We’re out here because the people have been abused long enough really. Their lands and their resources have been taken from them to the point where it’s putting them literally in poverty, and this facility has been a tool in doing that. It is the people’s facility, owned by the people.

In a separate statement posted on Facebook, Bundy said:

We’re out here because the people have been abused long enough.

Bundy called the prosecution of the Hammonds, the two Oregon ranchers convicted of arson, “a symptom of a very huge, egregious problem” that he described as a battle over land and resources between the federal government and “the American people.”

The people cannot survive without their land.  We cannot have the government restricting the use of that to the point that it puts us in poverty.

Mr. Bundy described the federal building as “the people’s facility, owned by the people” and said his group was occupying it to take “a hard stand against this overreach, this taking of the people’s land and resources.”

We pose no threat to anybody.  There is no person that is physically harmed by what we are doing. 

Bundy added that if law enforcement officials “bring physical harm to us, they will be doing it only for a facility or a building.”

 

Harney County's population is 7,126, with a poverty rate of 18%.  It's 88% non-Hispanic white population and its population density is 0.7 per square mile.  In terms of land area, Harney County is one of the 10 largest counties in the nation and the largest in Oregon.  

Here is a just-posted follow up piece in the NYTimes on what we know. 

Ammon Bundy accused of hiding assets

Boise State Public Radio reported recently under the headline, "Documents allege Ammon Bundy hiding his assets amid civil lawsuit." James Dawson and Ashley Dutton write:

New court documents accuse anti-government activist Ammon Bundy of hiding his assets in a new sequence of shell companies as a civil lawsuit against him continues.

In a video recording from April 19, Bundy said he sold his home and doesn’t have much for St. Luke’s Health System to recover in the case.

“I have a few cars that I own,” Bundy said, in addition to some tools and about $50,000 in cash.

St. Luke’s sued him, a close friend, Diego Rodriguez, and organizations tied to both men nearly a year ago after Bundy encouraged his followers to protest at the hospital. The grandson of Rodriguez was being evaluated at St. Luke’s over health concerns.

The protests last March sparked a lockdown at the hospital’s downtown Boise campus and forced ambulances to be rerouted.

The five-acre property in Emmett is now owned by White Barn Enterprises, an LLC registered by a company in Post Falls, and is estimated to be worth $1.2 million, according to court documents. The Gem County Assessor’s office said the property was worth $998,452 in its 2022 tax evaluation.

White Barn Enterprises is subsequently owned by a Wyoming corporation, Farmhouse Holdings LLC.

Just a handful of states, including Wyoming, allow owners of LLCs to remain anonymous.

Documents from the IRS filed by lawyers on behalf of St. Luke’s show both companies are owned by Aaron K. Welling, Bundy’s one-time treasurer for his unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign.

The filings also include an email exchange between Welling and Donovan LaCour, an advisor with Wyoming-based incorporation company Prime Corporate Services from Dec. 13, 2022.

Prior posts about Bundy are here (2017), here (2021), here (2016), here (2018), here (2022), here (2020) and here (2016).   

Timothy Egan suggests Western (or is it rural?) exceptionalism in reaction to Cliven Bundy

Timothy Egan's column, "Deadbeat on the Range," queries whether Tea Party and other right-wing types would respond to an urban scofflaw in the same way they have rallied around Cliven Bundy, the Nevada Rancher who is $1 million behind in payments on the land he leases from the federal government for grazing.  In doing so, Egan suggests a divide between East coasters and Westerners, and perhaps a rural-urban divide, too:    

Imagine a vendor on the National Mall, selling burgers and dogs, who hasn’t paid his rent in 20 years. He refuses to recognize his landlord, the National Park Service, as a legitimate authority. Every court has ruled against him, and fines have piled up. What’s more, the effluents from his food cart are having a detrimental effect on the spring grass in the capital. 

Would an armed posse come to his defense, aiming their guns at the park police? Would the lawbreaker get prime airtime on Fox News, breathless updates in the Drudge Report, a sympathetic ear from Tea Party Republicans? No, of course not. 

So what’s the difference between the fictional loser and Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who owes the government about $1 million and has been grazing his cattle on public land for more than 20 years? Near as I can tell, one wears a cowboy hat. Easterners, especially clueless ones in politics and the press, have always had a soft spot for a defiant white dude in a Stetson.

P.S.  Here is a straight news story that the NYTimes ran a few days after Egan's column, and here is an NPR story querying whether Bundy is a racist.

Eisenberg on the rural-urban divide in the today's Los Angeles Times

Ann Eisenberg of the University of South Carolina School of Law published an op-ed today in the LA Times, "The Bundys are Poster Boys for America's Rural/Urban Divide."  The first two paragraphs follow:

Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy went on trial in Las Vegas last week over their violent standoff with Bureau of Land Management officials in Nevada in 2014. Cliven had refused to stop grazing cattle on federal land, or to pay grazing fees. BLM agents trying to collect the cattle abandoned the effort when they were met by several hundred militant Bundy supporters. You may also remember Ammon and Ryan, Cliven’s sons, from another “rancher protest,” the occupation of the federal Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016. 

These armed standoffs are indefensible. But they are also symptomatic of bigger problems that weigh on our society. Longstanding tensions over Western federal land and deep conflicts between city “elites” and country “non-elites” help explain why some view Cliven Bundy as a folk hero and others see him as a domestic terrorist. These divisions could also account for a slew of not-guilty verdicts in four earlier trials related to the standoffs.

Don't miss this important and thoughtful contribution in its entirety.  Also be sure to have a look at the comments section, which feature plenty of rural bashing, as well as some rural folks dissociating themselves from Bundy et al. 

Rural economies tanking across the nation ... from Maine to Oregon, Kentucky to Wyoming

I've written about the situations in Wyoming and Kentucky here, both linked to lack of demand for and government regulation of coal production and burning.  But regulation and slowing of other extraction industry economies are also to blame in Oregon and Maine.  Of course, the Oregon situation has been very high profile for a few weeks now (read more here and here), and the New York Times ran this story about Maine a few days ago.  But I want to revisit in more detail what is being reported in these latter two locations because there is new information, new angles being covered.   

First, regarding the less captivating and less controversial situation in Maine, reported by Jess Bidgood in the NYT, the dateline is Cary Plantation in Aroostook County, population 69,447.   Bidgood quotes Diane Cassidy, a former nursing assistant who is leading the effort to dissolve the local government.    

What do you do, what does the town do, when they can’t pay their bills? Do we go bankrupt? Do we lose our homes?  There was no answer, other than deorganization.

Bidgood continues:

Ms. Cassidy is leading an effort to dissolve the local government here and join the Unorganized Territory, a vast swath of forest and townships in north, central and eastern Maine run by a partnership between the state and the counties. Last month, residents here voted 64 to 0 to continue the process. 

At a time of rising municipal costs, local governments around the country are looking for ways to rein in tax bills, pursuing privatization, the consolidation of services, mergers and even bankruptcy.

For more on local government bankruptcy and the challenges facing municipalities, read the work of Michelle Wilde Anderson.  Here's more from Bidgood's story:

But in northern Maine, as operating costs increased, the economy stagnated and the population aged and dwindled, a handful of struggling towns have pursued the unusual process of eliminating local government entirely. 

Bidgood quotes University of Maine professor of political science, Mark Brewer:

Just the price tag to keep their local governments up and running is more or less untenable.  It’s the final step in this long, drawn-out process which really starts with population decline.

Meanwhile, in the West, the struggle is to constrain local government power, although the local government in Harney County are not stepping forward to fill a void the Bundys would like to see created.  Indeed, the current elected officials in Harney County seem to be quite opposed to the Bundys and their tactics.

I have already written a great deal about the Bundy militia takeover of the wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, but a few pieces worthy of note have been published since my last post.  Like the reports about Maine, Wyoming, and Kentucky, important messages about these rural economies emerge.  Here's the latest from the New York Times, by Kirk Johnson, which I think provides incisive views of what's behind events in Harney County.  The headline says so much, "Rural Oregon's Lost Prosperity Gives Standoff a Distressed Backdrop":

Times were once very good out here on the high desert of east-central Oregon, and a place like Burns — remote and obscure until a group of armed protesters took over a nearby federal wildlife sanctuary this month — was full of civic pride and bustle. In their heyday, Harney County and its largest town, Burns, were economically important in a way that now seems unthinkable in the rural West.

There is so much to Johnson's story, which really does justice to the decades-long (downward) trajectory (or should I say "spiral"?) of the rural west.  After describing how metro centric and urbanormative (my words, not his) even Oregon has become (half of the state's jobs are in the three counties in and around Portland), Johnson closes with this quote from a 73-year-old who formerly worked in Burns's sawmills:

People in western Oregon don’t even know where Burns is.

And that is lent further perspective by this quote from state representative Cliff Bentz, a Republican whose district includes Harney County:

People feel powerless.  ... As the rural areas grow more and more poor and urban areas grow more and more wealthy, there’s a shift in power.

Johnson does a fabulous job of providing heaps of economic context, including how rural poverty has changed from its early associations with Appalachia and the South, when the face of poverty was often children and elderly.  Now, many of those living in rural poverty are working age, and the jobs are just not there for them, leaving entire families in poverty.

And this, shocking and nonsensical as it is for urban folks, is what is behind the State of Jefferson movement, as well as the move behind succession of counties in northern Colorado.  Read more here and here.

But don't forget the economic angle.  Here's a quote from Ammon Bundy last week:

Government controls the land and resources ... [which] has put people in duress and put them in poverty.

(For a good rebuttal of this point, see this New Yorker piece).

Again, lest we assume this all boils down to local-federal tension, don't forget the state--let alone the tension within so-called local levels of government.  Johnson writes:  

Some residents and local officials say they believe the history and relationship between the people and the government is being distorted by the protesters, and that cooperation across lines has worked well, to the benefit of the community. For instance, an arrangement with private landowners to protect a threatened bird species, the sage grouse — and to prevent even more restrictive government protections — was a model of how cooperation can work, they said.

An earlier NYT story echoes this tension among locals.  Read more here ("Fervor in Oregon Compound Fear Outside It") and here.  Johnson also quotes Steven E. Grasty, Harney County judge, who is chair of the county commissioners:  

Those are things that Mr. Bundy doesn’t know about or care about it.  ... We can keep building on those things if he would get out of the way.

And this perspective, as much as anything, gives me hope for Harney County and the rest of the rural west.  Pragmatism and a stance of collaboration--not to mention a little empathy--are critical starting points to resolving not only the standoff, but ensuring some future for the ranchers.  

NPR explores land rights for Western ranchers as a political issue

David Greene reported this morning from central Montana under the headline, "In Big Sky Country, Land Rights Are a Major Issue for Montana Ranchers."  While the transcript is not available online (as far as I can tell), the podcast is and, in short, the segment does a good job of conveying the perspectives of western ranchers.  They explain, for example, that the U.S. government is paternalistic toward them, second guessing how they run their ranching operations.  I admit that I went into the story with some empathy for ranchers, and I felt even more after hearing the story.  After all, as I have wrote on Twitter and on this blog soon after the Bundy Bros. & Co. took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, it seems hypocritical for me to defend the BLM too rigorously when I don't have to negotiate with them to feed my family.

But emotions on these issues do run high on both sides, and so I should not be surprised by some of the comments on the story ... but I was, especially, I suppose, by the tone:

a bunch of Red State whiners asking for more free stuff? Some of them, yet sounds like more people worrying about earning a livelihood. 

But if a grocer in inner city Chicago whined linked this, what would the Red Staters say?? They wouldnt hear it for a second, rather they would say change jobs. Why isnt this advice sufficient for the Ranchers?? 

Or what if a small business owner with a business degree where to make environmental policy for Yellowstone National Park? Bad idea right, but the red staters think a businessman is all knowing, which is why they elected Bush, nominated Romney and Trump. 

These ranchers need to learn the ways of big business, get some lobbyists to help them. That is how it works. If you have bad policy, well then you have to grease the wheels of DC and get what you want.

Note the explicit rural-urban comparison.  Also, on the "change jobs" point, isn't it the case that if too many ranchers change jobs, we'll have more agricultural production in fewer hands than we already do? That doesn't seem like a great solution to me.  Plus, there's more hatefulness where this one came from.

But there is also this, siding with, offering an apologia for the ranchers:

You may want to listen more to what these ranchers have to say as opposed to assuming you have a full understanding of the issues at hand. Most of what they are talking about doesn't even relate to federal land -- it relates to government regulation on PRIVATE land as well. I guarantee that if anyone spent a few days with some of these ranchers and really understood a lot of the issues they were facing, their views would change dramatically. These aren't Cliven Bundy types who want to essentially steal from the public -- they are people trying to run their businesses and support great communities and face very real (often unnecessary) challenges ... and often those challenges are causes by people from far away who don't really understand the issues but for some reason assume they do.

So little empathy to go around, everything polarized in red v. blue terms.  Yuck!

This report is part of NPR's "The View from Here" series.  

Trump pardons Oregon ranchers who inspired Malheur seizure in early 2016

Carl Segerstrom reports for the High Country News, calling father-and-son Hammonds "symbols of anti-federal movement."  Here's an excerpt from today's story:

The pardon follows a plea for clemency from Republican Congressman Greg Walden of Oregon, on June 26.

In a press release, Walden wrote: “Today is a win for justice, and an acknowledgement of our unique way of life in the high desert, rural West. I applaud President Trump for thoroughly reviewing the facts of this case, rightly determining the Hammonds were treated unfairly, and taking action to correct this injustice.” 

Environmental groups and supporters of the refuge had a different take on the pardon. “We regret the message sent by the president when pardoning the Hammonds, which bolsters those intent on destroying federal property and endangering federal employees,” said Geoffrey Haskett, the president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. 

The father-and-son duo were imprisoned for arson after setting a series of fires on private land that moved on to public land. While Walden has claimed that the Hammonds were simply using the fires as a range management tool, witnesses in the federal case against the Hammonds testified that one of the multiple fires were set to cover up evidence of illegal deer poaching on Bureau of Land Management land. Federal agencies incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses fighting the fires.

The Hammonds have a history of clashes with federal land managers in rural eastern Oregon. Malheur refuge employees have alleged that they have received death threats from Dwight Hammond dating back to 1986.

Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, a public-lands advocacy group, is quoted regarding the significance of he pardon: 

Pardoning the Hammonds sends a dangerous message to America’s park rangers, wildland firefighters, law enforcement officers, and public lands managers.  President Trump, at the urging of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, has once again sided with lawless extremists who believe that public land does not belong to all Americans.

Earlier coverage of the Malheur seizure is here, here, here, and here.  The New York Times coverage of today's pardon is here.  I note that the "gray lady" uses the same Rokala quote but buries the comments from Representative Walden much deeper in its story.

Washington Post coverage of the matter included an interview with Land Tawney, president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, who said that the outright pardon, as opposed to a commutation of the sentence,

sends a message of tolerance for lawbreakers who could diminish our public lands and waters.

Tawney predicted that the decision "will send shock waves up the ranks of the BLM" and commented: 

You are just empowering and emboldening those who disrespect the people who are there to manage these lands for all the people of America.  

Here is coverage from The Oregonian, which includes a phone interview with Susie Hammond, wife and mother of the ranchers.   It reports that the Hammonds "walked out of a federal prison in California about 6 1/2 hours" after Trump signed the pardon. It also quotes Ammon Bundy, who led the 41-day Malheur Wildlife Refuge seizure:

"The true reason the Hammonds have suffered has not been corrected. It must be corrected." [Bundy] pledged to continue to fight against the federal government's "control over land and resources inside our states."

The Oregonian story features this family photo, apparently from Susie Hammond's Facebook page.

These excerpts come from my (very left-leaning) Twitter feed:

and

More commentary on Western ranchers in relation to the federal government is here and here.

Attitudes about public land, on both sides of the Mississippi (Part I): Recalling public opinions about the Malheur siege

One thing that struck me about responses to the Bundy Bros. taking of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January was the East-West divide, that is, how attitudes seemed to differ broadly speaking between those who live on land taken from Native Americans hundreds of years ago (in the East) and those who work land taken from Native Americans somewhat more recently (think Lewis & Clark a mere 200 years ago and the Indian wars that ensued).  (On the siege of Malheur, read more here and here, plus embedded links.  Remember that many Westerners indicated dissatisfaction about their relations with the feds, even though they did not support the tactics of the Bundy militia.  Indeed, a new study reported by Montana Public Radio this past week indicates that conservation has strong bi-partisan strength in Montana).

Generally speaking, I am suggesting that East (and some left) coasters (including many liberal elites, progressives, members of the narrating classes--sorta' like myself) who ridicule ranchers for failing to appreciate the value of public land, wildlife, and wilderness are arguably hypocrites because no one is trying to manage "for public good" the land on which the east coasters live and from which they make a living.

Why is no one trying to manage that land on which the East coasters live?  As far as I can tell, there are two principal reasons: (1) because it is already urbanized, highly developed, worth so much more than "wilderness" and (2) because it was taken from American Indians more than four centuries ago--as if some statute of limitations has run on this expropriation such that it need not be acknowledged and has nothing to teach about nor any relevance to the agitation of ranchers in the West, ranchers seeking more control over the land that provides their livelihood.  In short, most land East of the Mississippi River was designated "private property" a long time ago, whereas that is true for relatively little of the West.

I recall a lot of rhetoric in January and February this year--including in comments to news stories about the Malheur siege--indicating that ranchers in the West just don't "get it."  That is, ranchers who rely on the BLM  and grazing rights to make a living and help supply the nation with food don't "get" the importance of public land, wildlife, bird watching, and wilderness generally.  They are being selfish for wanting more control over the land where they graze their cattle or sheep.

But when someone in Boston--or even San Francisco--ridicules ranchers for their failure to understand that this is federal land--it's "public land"--those coastal commentators are surely at least a bit hypocritical because no one is trying to take the land on which they make their living or otherwise threatening their livelihoods.  No one is proposing, for example, a massive set aside of public land in New York or Maryland or even Georgia or Mississippi. This makes it easier for East coast elites to roll their eyes at Westerners, but part of their rationalization in doing so is simply because a big chunk of the West--unlike the East--was retained by the federal government and never homesteaded/privatized.  You could view that as a highly salient distinction--or as an accident of history.  Either way, there is a dearth of empathy from coastal elites who want access to wilderness, but who don't have to cede any of their means of making a living to secure it.  In short, coastal folks don't really have any skin in this game, though they often have strong feelings about these issues.  Witness a Twitter exchange I found myself in the day following the siege of the Malheur Refuge:

Man on Twitter: “Imagine being so whacked out you think the *Bureau of Land Management* is the most tyrannical federal agency.”

I responded,  “That is a very metro centric perspective …”

Man on Twitter:  “how many American citizens has the BLM assassinated?
”

               

To this I responded, “not talking objective right or wrong; talking perspective”

To which my tweeting nemesis replied: “ so you agree that thinking the BLM is the most tyrannical agency is objectively wrong?”

My response: “Not even close to what I said.”

And before I could even zap off that last Tweet, he added, "(I grew up in the rural southwest by the way, I'm extremely familiar with the BLM)."

* * * 

So he got the last word.  It didn’t seem useful to try to continue the conversation.  You get the idea.  

Now, however, the designation of federal lands is on the agenda in the far East--in upstate Maine.  The proposed national park or national monument in Maine has gotten a lot of media attention in the past few weeks (see more here and here), which gives us a chance to see how things look when you put the shoe on the other foot.  I'll return to this topic in my next post.

More balanced reporting on Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning what the Bundy brothers and others are doing at Malheur National Wildlife Reserve in rural southeast Oregon.  In that regard, I'm apparently in the same camp as some locals.  Read more here, here, here, here, and here.  Some reporting, including on NPR featuring a columnist for The Oregonian, Les Zaitz, who lives in Burns, have emphasized that many locals are agitated about the BLM but that they do not support the tactics of the militias who have taken over the Malheur refuge.

I do, however, think it is important not to be too metrocentric about these events--as I have already suggested on this blog and on Twitter.  I don't think rolling our eyes at the Bundys and their buddies helps anyone.  After all, I am not reliant on the BLM to feed my family, but these ranchers are, and so they have very strong feelings. Why are we so dismissive of that?

Indeed, I am reminded by what President Obama said about rural folks during his first election campaign, in what became known as "Bittergate."

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.  And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Note the similarities between Obama's comments and what Senator Ron Wyden said a few days ago about those who have taken over Malheur, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:

There’s enormous frustration about the economy and a very powerful sense in rural communities that nobody listens to them, that they don’t have any power, that their voices don’t matter. But the next step isn’t to be led by some outsiders into doing something that doesn’t help anybody.

This evening, Amanda Peacher of Oregon Public Broadcasting filed a story in which she quotes a rancher whose last name is Johnson.  The full transcript of that story is not yet up, but some telling comments --telling of disdain for the rural--are.  Mrs. Johnson told of taking her five children out to meet those who are occupying Malheur, so that they would not be afraid and so that they would have a better understanding of what is happening.  Because of my struggle with formatting, I am providing my own commentary on the reader comment BEFORE I provide the reader comment

My comment:

I don't think liberals would say something that pejorative about nonwhites who have five children. So why are they saying it about whites who happen to work a ranch in rural Oregon, a ranch with which they are presumably feeding themselves and their five children, presumably working hard every day to make it all work. Is this the sort of activity we want to discourage? (the ranching, not the armed takeover, that is?)

 Here is the reader comment to which I respond:

Brim Stone • 2 hours ago

FIVE kids? Her opinion immediately invalidated.

Move on.

Could clever fish-spawning strategy avert violence in Klamath water wars?

Anita Chabria and Hailey Branson-Potts report from Tulelake, California, population 1,020, in Siskiyou County:  

It’s a strange place to find fish, deep in the high desert, where drought-baked earth butts against scrubby mountains.

But water spews from the hot springs on Ron Barnes’ land near the California-Oregon border, pure and perfect for rearing c’waam and koptu, two kinds of endangered suckerfish sacred to Native American tribes.

Barnes, who holds an advanced degree in aquaculture from UC Davis, has dug dozens of ponds on his property and filled them with thousands of young suckerfish. He hopes raising and releasing them into the wild will end the region’s epic water wars — or at least get federal regulators out of the mix before his neighbors descend into violence.

The story quotes Barnes:  

We have to take a pragmatic view of this thing.  The single most effective way to get the government off our backs is to restore the fish population.

The story continues: 

The suckerfish, which are on the endangered species list, are at the heart of a rancorous water controversy. They typically spawn in nearby Upper Klamath Lake, an agricultural reservoir that is growing increasingly dry and toxic. To ward off their extinction, federal regulators have cut off every drop that normally flows from the lake to the Klamath Reclamation Project, a federally built web of irrigation canals that once held the promise of almost limitless water for nearby farms.

Growers and landowners in the region are divided between those who are furious but want a peaceable path forward, like Barnes, and those who are threatening to take water by force.

A recent post about the drought that is aggravating the Klamath water wars and Ammon Bundy's role in advocating taking the water by force, is here.  Earlier posts about the Klamath water wars are here.  

The latest on the Klamath (California) water wars, from local journalists

From the Bill Lane Center for the American West, "As the Klamath Basin’s water crisis worsens, local journalism explores a way forward."  The subtitle is:  "With grant support, a Klamath Falls, Oregon, newspaper sought “kernels of solutions” for a divided community’s problems with drought and resource depletion. The lead reporter reflects on his experiences."  

Here's an excerpt:  

Water Year 2021 was, by many accounts, the worst the Klamath Basin had experienced in modern history. Water Year 2022 might give it a run for its money. Climate change is a big contributor — a recent study showed that, with the help of 2020 and 2021, the West’s current megadrought is the worst in 1,200 years. Warming temperatures were responsible for about a fifth of that intensity.

* * *  

Last summer, the Klamath became the ugly face of climate change in the dry West. Farmers in the federally managed Klamath Irrigation Project went without water for the first time ever. Thousands of baby salmon died of disease while C’waam and Koptu, two ancient species of suckers in Upper Klamath Lake, inched closer to extinction. Birds skipped their ancestral rest stops on the Pacific Flyway as 95 percent of the basin’s remaining wetlands dried up. When cooperation between stakeholders was never more crucial, anti-government activist Ammon Bundy threatened to show up and wreak havoc.

News crews flocked to the remote basin to cover what appeared to be Ground Zero for the new round of water wars. I saw countless pieces by reporters trying to wrap their heads around the situation’s dizzying complexity. Lacking space and time to tell the full story, some picked sides. Solutions are seldom as newsworthy as conflict.

Having joined the Herald and News in Klamath Falls as part of the Report for America service journalism corps, I had received a grant that spring from MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative to produce reporting on climate change impacts and solutions in my area. My challenge was to frame this climate-driven crisis, which magnifies the basin’s existing water woes, as an opportunity.

So I described the kind of clothes the Klamath would need to survive. A thick cloak with fabric made of wetlands would wick winter moisture and temper summer thirst. Sturdy boots of scientific inquiry and traditional knowledge would provide stability over shifting sands and soils. Everything would be held together by the stitches of collaboration among diverse communities.

Don't miss the rest of the story.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XIV): Idaho

Two coronavirus stories out of Idaho reveal different ends of that state's socioeconomic and political continuum--from Sandpoint in the panhandle to SunValley in the east central part of the state, a prime example of rural gentrification.

The first story is by Mike Baker for the New York Times and is headlined, "A ‘Liberty’ Rebellion in Idaho Threatens to Undermine Coronavirus Orders."  The subhead is "Even some public officials have challenged social-distancing requirements, calling them assaults on the Constitution. One group wants to gather up to 1,000 people for Easter."  This story features the state's libertarian streak and is predictably consistent with the politics of the panhandle region in particular.  Turns out Ammon Bundy, from neighboring Nevada and a ringleader of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge seizure from a few years ago, is associated with the "rebellion."

The second story is by The New Yorker, and its headline is "Why an Idaho Ski Destination Has One of the Highest COVID-19 Infection Rates in the Nation."  Michael Ames writes of a super-spreading event that began in Sun Valley, where some 700 members of the "Black Summit of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (N.B.S.), the largest African-American ski and snowboard association in the world" gathered in early March.  They came from across the United States, and some from as far away as Europe for their 47th annual "mountain meet up."  By the following week, 126 members had symptoms of coronavirus, and several have since died. 

Interestingly, President Trump twice invoked Idaho as a success story in March.  Ames describes Trump's comments, suggesting that the state's wide open spaces made it impervious to coronavirus: 

“Parts of our country are very lightly affected. Very small numbers,” Trump said, on March 24th. “You look at Nebraska, you look at Idaho, you look at Iowa, you look at many—I could name many countries that are handling it very, very well and that are not affected to the same extent, or, frankly, not even nearly to the extent of New York.” Five days later, Trump ticked off the same triumvirate of “countries.” “I said, ‘How about Nebraska? How about Idaho? How about Iowa?’ And you know what? Those people are so great—the whole Midwest,” he said, missing Idaho on the map by a thousand miles or so.

Meanwhile, also from the Rockies, I love how Montana is using fish and fishing equipment as reference points for the six-feet social distancing recommendation.  Here's the Fox news account of the distinctly Montanan public service announcement which some are calling "fishtancing.":

Montana may be the third-lowest state in terms of population density in the U.S., but it hasn't stopped its Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department from coming up with unique ways to recommend social distancing to its residents amid the coronavirus outbreak. 

The department has converted the recommended six-feet social distancing rule -- intended to limit the spread of COVID-19 -- into social "fishtancing" -- expressing the gap in terms of the lengths of several varieties of fish. 

For example, the recommended gap equals “4 trout,” “2 shovelnose sturgeon,” “1 paddlefish” or “1 fishing rod” measurements, according to a Twitter post by the government agency.

A thriving local newspaper in the acutely remote West

NPR ran a feature this morning on The Malheur Enterprise, a (now) highly successful local, weekly newspaper based in Malheur County, Oregon, right on the Idaho state line.  If the proper name "Malheur" rings a bell, it may be because that's also the name of the national wildlife refuge that the Bundy brothers and co. seized in January, 2016.  Read posts about that incident here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  One of those posts mentions Les Zaitz, a rancher from eastern Oregon who also wrote a column for the statewide paper, The Oregonian, and has twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.  Turns out, it is Zaitz and his family who bought The Malheur Enterprise in 2015, and they have quickly revamped and revitalized what was a dying paper.   NPR's Tom Goldman describes the Enterprise in its prior incarnation as almost out of business, filed with press releases and doing a good job of covering only one subject:  local high school sports.  Zaitz explains:

It had not had an ad sales person in ten years. It took only what business came in the front door.  There was just no doubt in my mind that if we turned around the news product, and got a sales person in, we could make the thing profitable pretty quick.

In fact, Since Zaitz took over the paper, its circulation has "surged," and it has "won several national awards."  Goldman continues under the headline, "Revenue has tripled":

"Boomed" is a relative term when it comes to a rural weekly. Paid subscriptions are at about 2,000. But during a recent week, more than a third of Malheur County's roughly 30,000 residents read the paper's online edition. And advertising dollars, the lifeblood of a small newspaper, are way up.

Those 2,000 subscribers number about the same as the residents of the county seat, Vale, where the paper is based.  Goldman again quotes Zaitz: 

Our overall revenue is more than triple what it was three years ago.  Circulation is probably double. We're profitable and there are not a lot of papers in the United States that can say they're profitable.

Another cute aspect of the story is the focus on the 74-year-old woman who delivers it from her white pick up truck, logging more than a 100 miles each Wednesday as she traverses Oregon's second largest county. 

As it happens, I was on a small team of folks who tried to get Les Zaitz to Portland this past summer for a panel on the Malheur seizure at the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting.  His email response said:

Your invitation is very kind but I won't be available those dates. Just so you know, my day office is about 350 miles from Portland these days.

I got a kick out of his focus on distance--as if we non Oregonians would have no clue as to just how big Oregon is and just how far his home in the southeastern reaches of the state is from the better known (and hipster) Portland. 

The story about the Malheur Enterprise reminds me of my earlier musings on the success of Iowa's Storm Lake Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing a few years ago.  That Pulitzer prize led to publisher Art Cullen's writing of his first book, Storm Lake, which I began reading a few weeks ago.  It's essentially a social, cultural and family history of northwest Iowa. 

I'm also reminded of David Leonhardt's column in the New York Times a few days ago urging everyone to subscribe to--and thereby support--a local newspaper.  Democracy cannot survive without it.

Poking fun, on social media, at those who took over the federal buildings in central Oregon

The Los Angeles Times reports today these Twitter hashtags for the week-end's happenings in central Oregon—namely the seizure by anti-government activists of some buildings associated with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

#OregonUnderAttack

#YallQaeda and 

#YokelHaram

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, though I will admit that my initial headline for yesterday's post about these events used the phrase "domestic terrorism."  

Meanwhile, Kirk Johnson and Jack Healy report in today's New York Times on how this all started: 

The protesters arrived in this old lumber town to support a 73-year-old rancher and his son who had been sentenced to prison for setting fires on federal lands. It was billed as a peaceful demonstration, but after “Amazing Grace” was sung and hugs were exchanged, a small, armed contingent declared outside a supermarket that it was taking a stand and asked who wanted to join it. 

So began the latest armed flare-up in a decades-long struggle between federal officials and local landowners and ranchers over how to manage the Western range.

Johnson and Healy quote Ryan Payne, an Army veteran involved in the siege:

We will be here for as long as it takes.  People have talked about returning land to the people for a long time. Finally, someone is making an effort in that direction.

Finally, while such events are often depicted as reflecting the antipathy to the federal government, this latest New York Times story quotes the Harney County Sheriff, David M. Ward, who suggests that it is also about the local government:

These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.

It will be interesting to learn in coming hours and days the source of the Sheriff's information in this regard.

By the way, the LA Times coverage of the events is the best I've seen to date in terms of putting it in context of prior events, including the Cliven Bundy events in Nevada last year, as well as references to Ruby Ridge, Idaho.  Most significantly, however, the LA Times provides the perspective of U.S. Senator from Oregon Ron Wyden:

Wyden compared the frustrations of the activists to those of all rural Oregonians, who face a troubled economy yet to fully recover from the decline of the timber industry and dwindling federal dollars to replace lost timber income. 

“There’s enormous frustration about the economy and a very powerful sense in rural communities that nobody listens to them, that they don’t have any power, that their voices don’t matter,” Wyden said. “But the next step isn’t to be led by some outsiders into doing something that doesn’t help anybody.”

As for the sense that nobody listens to these folks, I refer you to earlier posts about the State of Jefferson, including this very recent one by a student in my law and rural livelihoods class.

I do not condone what these people are doing, but I can try in some small way to empathize with them. After all, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) may seem innocuous to me, but I don't have to interface with the BLM and it has nothing to do with how or whether I am able to to feed my family.